"NPR goes off the dial: Firing Juan Williams is political correctness on steroids

Friday, October 22nd 2010, 4:00 AM

National Public Radio fired Juan Williams for the offense of being human.

Appearing on "The O'Reilly Factor," the NPR commentator made the mistake of confessing that a thought about Muslims had occasionally crossed his mind when he traveled on airplanes. It is a thought that has crossed millions of American minds. Here it is:

"I mean, look, Bill, I'm not a bigot. You know the kind of books I've written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on a plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they're identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous."

That was enough for NPR, whose executives are surely able to swear that never have they harkened back to 9/11 on seeing an identifiably Muslim person at the check-in counter.

It's a natural reaction in an era when 19 Islamist fanatics hijacked four planes and killed 3,000 people and when Islamist fanatics attempted to down airliners with shoe and underwear bombs.

What's more, recognizing, as Williams clearly does, that some mental responses carry the danger of stigmatization is quite healthy. The result is no action, no harm, no foul.

Finally, Williams went on to say it is as wrong to blame all Muslims for 9/11 as it is to blame all Christians for the crime of Timothy McVeigh.

He also challenged his host for fearmongering: "We don't want, in America, people to have their rights violated, to be attacked on the street because they heard rhetoric from Bill O'Reilly."

The episode comes down to prejudgment. And that's exactly what NPR did to Williams."